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story

Cat-faced Joe’s world is situated a couple hundred years in the future, time is a difficult thing to track but some people claim that the year is 2666, but that’s just an urban legend, like Cat-faced Joe himself. The main goal of this character is get back his human appearance, by reaching a place called “The Garden of Eden”, from where he supposes he got his looks, along with his longevity and the ability to see in the dark.

The human days of Cat-faced Joe were lived a little ahead of our time, and were interrupted by a cosmic holocaust. Something happened to the earth, the dead seemed to be backing to life, a lot of people thought it was the Apocalypse and some thought it was a zombie crisis (which made a lot people excited, by the way) but the dead people where not who they were in their life time, not because they would go in the streets after brains, but simply because they were someone else. The dead gathered themselves and built stuff, lots of stuff, stuff beyond any human knowledge, they created their own society before the eyes of an astonished humanity, and they had a grim smile in their lips while they did it, all of them. Scientists were able to recover a corpse of a living dead guy and discovered that there were some kind of a parasite attached to his brain, and later they discovered that the parasite came from the meteor that fell into Russia February 2013. They raped the earth and all living beings; they built ships and took off a long time before Cat-faced Joe’s story begins, but not without leaving some samples of their cruelty behind, like grotesques experiments with humans and animals.

The first thing Cat-faced Joe needs to do before continue his journey to the Garden of Eden is to show Carolyn how to get water (a very rare thing) from the man in the egg house. Carolyn is a young woman who lives in a shelter built in the undergrounds of a wasted city; she, her brother Tommy, Vince and Mary (who are a couple just about to have a baby), an old dude called Barry and a punk kid called Mick are the ones who inhabit the place. They were being helped by Joe since some time ago, and now he would leave them.

A few incidents led Cat-faced Joe out of his way to an underground city, which is abundant in technology and resources, while Carolyn and the others have to handle with a little girl who was trying to escape from the same place. Joe reveals to a scientist he had been in that city before, a long time ago, and served as a medium to the minds of the aliens, the reason being that he has their DNA in him, every hybrid experiment was made using their DNA, and even normal humans were contaminated with it in some occasions, in a way that these humans would have their minds shared with the alien collective mind. This concept of collective mind is central here, it is the reason why humans were able to develop the surveillance system based on that city, using beings who share DNA with aliens to access their minds and learn if they can come back. Joe questions the man about the use of human children in the surveillance of the aliens, and says it was forbidden as long as he remembers, and the answer is that the space entities are coming back, that some are already here, in the Garden of Eden, that there is no time and the hybrids they have are insufficient to learn the information they need from their minds. The man also says that there is a huge conflict in that city, between people who agree with use of children at the operations and those who don’t. At the end of their encounter Joe agrees to let them use him to access the minds of the aliens, as long as they use no children with that purpose. After a while Joe discovers that the people in charge of the city are using its technology to feed the alien’s minds with human dreams, creativity and individuality. He asks for help, through the dreams of the child who escaped the city, and is rescued by his friends, what allows him to continue the search for his human face.

Authors

 

Rafael Bueno is the guy writing “Cat-faced Joe”. Among other things he studies drawing, music and got a bachelor degree on psychology. Living in Brazil inspires him to incorporate questions about values and ethics in his writings, since he sees the subversion of such things made by powerful people pretending good will.

Gregory Floch was always picky as a child.  A pencil crooked on the table, a chair facing the wrong way, he always noticed it and imagined things as they should be.  Now published with Yil publishing for "la plume maudite" Floch is ultimately comfortable.  His pen is there, his brush is here, and his strange art way sometimes with ink and other times paint let him know, everything is in its place.